Plastic grocery bags are light, sturdy and easy to carry because of built-in handles. They also have the added advantage of preventing foods from leaking should an accident occur while enroute from a store to the home. Plastic bags are used extensively in supermarkets, grocery stores and other stores selling multiple household items. A typical type of plastic bag used in such stores is known as a T-shirt bag, an example of which shown in FIG. 1. These bags come bundled together and are designed to be used on a bag holder. One example of such a current holder is a rectangular cubic rack (FIG. 2), which is used not only to hold a bundle of T-shirt bags, but also permits the leading bag to stay open while a bagger or cashier puts the merchandise inside the bag.
Most of the time customers buy more than the capacity of one bag. As a result there is a need for two or more bags. In addition, sometimes customers buy different items that cannot be next to each other in one bag. For example, items such as Clorox, bar soap or laundry detergent should not be placed in one bag next to food items such as fresh meat, fish or deli items. In other words, each category of items should be packed in its own bag.
While bagging groceries, sometimes there is only one rack available per user. This limitation of rack availability increases the usage of T-shirt bags because, if there is a need for separation, the user has to pull the T-shirt bag out of the rack prematurely before the bag is filled and start a new bag to separate different merchandise. To overcome this problem, some stores use two rectangular cubic racks side by side or next to each other, while other stores use multi-unit carousel racks that have three or more rectangular cubic racks on top of a circular board or base. The carousel racks can easily turn to the left or to the right along with their base. These multi-unit carousel racks have some advantages compared to two side by side racks, such as giving more than one choice to the user in separating items. As a result, the user can use more of the capacity of the bags before the bags are removed from the racks. Another advantage of multi-unit carousel racks is that the speed of bagging groceries by the cashier is increased and less baggers are required which cuts back on the required man power.
However, there are disadvantages of current multi-unit carousel racks. The cubic rectangular racks on a carousel base are far from each other and the cashier does not have easy access to more than two racks. As a result, for the cashier to put additional items into a third bag, their work (scanning new items) stops since they have to turn the carousel either to the right or to the left. Alternatively, the cashier will need to take extra steps to the left or right to put the next item inside the third bag. In addition, the diameter of the circular base of the carousel racks are large and some stores, especially the smaller ones, do not have the space for these big carousel racks at their front end tables next to the cashier.
It is with these considerations that the present invention is contemplated.